


in dreams a place of wind and flowers

by oriflamme



Series: stand still stay silent [2]
Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Gen, No Hotakainen Is Neurotypical
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-19 10:21:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20208154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oriflamme/pseuds/oriflamme
Summary: Onni only wants his family to be safe.(Onni has always wanted what he can’t have.)





	in dreams a place of wind and flowers

Onni only wants his family to be safe.

-

(Onni has always wanted what he can’t have.)

-

When they are younger, Lalli’s nonverbal periods fly under the radar. If he seems more distracted by the view through the window and reluctant to answer questions in lessons than the handful of other kids in school, it becomes a nonissue when their grandmother takes him as an apprentice. The two of them vanish in the remote reaches of Saimaa for months on end, where silence and a preternatural, overly sensitive perception are assets to be cultivated, and teacher Kerttu’s concerned talks with Tuulikki and Jukka – and Juha, by natural extension - blend into the background of memory.

Whenever the adults shoo them all away – _go play with your cousin _rather than _with the other children_, because Hotakainens cleave together – Onni is too busy wrangling Tuuri to worry about Lalli. Their cousin is another set of watchful eyes at best: Ensi trains both of them to discipline their minds and strike clean, but out in the forest she teaches Lalli to scout. Onni learns to pay attention when Lalli peers into a fissure in the rocks or a hollow in the grass. If they’re searching for a particular rock or berry bush for Tuuri, odds are good Lalli has already found it and doesn't see the point of announcing it aloud.

At worst, Lalli disappears without a sound, there and gone in the split second Onni’s distracted. He’s perfectly self-sufficient and not afraid to take off when he’s bored or disinterested. But he almost always turns up back in the town center, more interested in quietly munching another round of bread and listening to the adults chatter. He naps on sunlit rocks or goes down to the clear pond with his fishing pole, but never truly strays. If Onni tries to hold him, Lalli squirms and hisses and darts away in a quicksilver flicker, a fish slithering between his fingers. Eventually, Lalli will wander back and give Onni half a heart attack, tucking a fresh, warm bun into Onni’s pocket without a word of warning, like a reward for when Onni doesn’t fuss - but he always comes back.

He and Onni can both hear what's out there.

-

When Tuuri sneaks away, she always runs to the shore.

-

Tuuri should have friends. She’s bright, enthusiastic, animated, able to chatter for days about her latest find or passing interest. She bubbles over with all the words that seem to have skipped Lalli and Onni, on both sides of the family. She’s one of Kerttu’s favorite students, bouncing up in her seat to recite passages from the _Kalevala_ before anyone else, volunteering to pass out the well-worn almanacs on planting and survival, staying late to beg for more lessons in Kerttu’s rudimentary Icelandic. “A born skald,” Kerttu tells their parents proudly, and no one tells Tuuri that means she’ll be her apprentice, next in line to be the teacher on their small island. In the mornings, with the window open to let in the cool dawn air, Tuuri bobs excitedly with stars in her eyes as their mother braids her hair and listens with her fond, sad smile as Tuuri describes the fire-mountains of Iceland.

And yet.

On a small isle like theirs, with only around fifteen children their age, it’s hard not to notice that when they congregate during festivals, Tuuri always winds up alone, waving at the backs of the other girls as they split off in twos and threes. She’ll brighten, open her mouth to call after them – and then seem to catch herself. Then, smile welded firmly in place, she skips over to join the family at her usual spot on the bench where she sits and watches the crowd, fidgeting through her excitement with her hands tightly laced in her lap.

Her bright, brittle smile dims in stages.

As the evening winds down, Onni rests a hand on her shoulder. Tuuri swivels to face the rest of the table with a huff and a sigh. Lalli blinks owlishly at them from across the wide boards, slips under the table halfway through the meal, and picks slices of salmon off Tuuri's plate as she pushes her food aimlessly around.

-

It becomes a problem when Tuuri realizes Lalli won't argue with her, and none of their parents quite understand what that means. Even when Tuuri manages to win some time with other playmates, they always seem to find a reason or excuse to leave after Tuuri's gushing babble hits its stride, and so Tuuri has an awful lot of time alone with her own thoughts to get clever.

-

"Why would I _want_ to go? I don't like playing ketju," Lalli asks once, when they invite him out to play in the square, with a squint of displeasure that would read on anyone else as a pout. From Lalli, the question is also an explanation.

"Because they're your cousins. You will have fun, my little bunny!" Auntie Tuulikki promises, kissing the side of his head. But Lalli's expression stays furrowed in a frown when Tuuri tows him out of the door, as though that didn't actually answer his question. When the children start joining their hands and tangling themselves up in a human knot, giggling and close, Lalli sprints out from under their grasping arms in a crouch, finds Onni on the sidelines, and stays huddled beside him until enough time has passed that he can go home without being sent back again. Onni hangs back under the shade of an overhanging roof to supervise, and he makes sure that there's an empty spot on the crooked, half-overgrown bench where Lalli can curl up and stop flinching.

It drives Tuuri to distraction. "Onni, can you guys just stop messing around and _play _like everyone else?" she hisses, stamping her foot. Anxious and aggrieved, she glances over her shoulder at the other children who are waiting on them. "Why do you guys have to make a big deal out of everything! C'mon! Please?" 

Onni grimaces, Lalli pulls his hood up over his head, and finally Tuuri sticks out her tongue and runs off to play, radiating ever more animated, bouncy energy to make up for her stick in the mud family.

(Neither of them do well with crowds.)

In the places where their parents' logic and Lalli's logic don't quite intersect, Lalli adapts. When he doesn't want to do something - because he dislikes crowds, because it's not actually _fun_ for him - and he's told to do it anyway, he learns to shrug, say 'okay,' and then vanish as soon as he's clear. A path of least resistance. Only rarely will he plant his feet, refuse to go, and shut down, eyes screwed shut and hands over his ears.

But Tuuri learns, too. She tells their parents she and Lalli will be out, and they don't understand. Even when Onni tells them that Tuuri eyes the boats in the harbor too closely, that she's starting to get _ideas _in her head, they trust that the kids are old enough and responsible enough to adventure around the island on their own. Even if the Hotakainen kids only ever seem to play with each other, that's fine.

"Lalli and I are going blueberry picking!" Tuuri calls, and she's already rushed Lalli down the rough path to the northern edge of the island before it occurs to Onni that Lalli would never _stay_ with her. Lalli hates blueberries; he doesn't see the point.

Onni pelts through the woods in a rising panic, whip-thin branches lashing his face and clumsy feet catching on every possible root. Lalli is midway through scaling his favorite napping branch. At Onni's incoherent shout of alarm, Lalli half-falls, half-drops into the moss blanket, startled.

Tuuri is already at the cliff overlooking the thin strip of the northern shore. The water here is fenced off, too, but not as thoroughly as that around the main village harbor. You could follow the thin line of beach almost all the way around to the docks, if you were quick and clever and adventurous enough to risk the occasional foot in shallow water. She leans so far out on the tips of her toes - her eyes and mouth bright with an irrepressible, beaming grin -

\- that lasts right up until Onni charges out of the brush and yanks her back. Terror is a white-hot needle, the heat prickling outward until everything else narrows to that vision of Tuuri, arms spread wide on the edge of the cliff.

"Come _on, _Onni!" she yells, kicking hard enough to bruise his arms as he hauls her back through the woods. "I was only looking! You - oof! - can't prove anything! Why are you _always _like this?!"

(Lalli is there. He follows them at a distance in the trees like a ghost, his eyes round. He's only seven, and he hides from Onni so thoroughly for the next week that Onni loses the heart to scold him.

Tuuri doesn't try again for a month.)

-

They're late to the harvest celebration.

Onni does most of the rowing. Mostly because he doesn't trust Tuuri with a paddle in her hands and a gleam in her eye. Their father wants them to take the boat back to the small family dock, so he and Tuuri can unload everything for the night. They know from past experience that no one will be in the mood after a long afternoon and evening of stuffing themselves. Mother and Father and Auntie Tuulikki and Uncle Jukka join the rest of the harvest crowd as they make their way up the steps, laughing and greeting those who stayed in the village, to the lantern-lit town square. Tuuri rests her elbows on the side and sighs longingly over the opaque, dark water as they push away from the dock; she stares back out toward the gate as it closes behind them. With every passing year, she becomes less subtle, but by now she knows better than to suggest to Onni that they slip back out and visit one of the smaller, uninhabited isles.

It takes a little longer with only Onni rowing. The boat is laden with everything they packed for the month-long trip to the farming island and their family's share of the grain, mushrooms, and preserves. He navigates the safest path through the shallows, even when it meanders. Tuuri switches gears from dangerous, adventurous thoughts and starts drumming her feet on the bottom of the boat in anticipation. By the time they hit the family dock she's groaning with impatience at how slow Onni rows and how they're going to miss the food - as if him rowing harder will make the brine-soaked lamb roast any faster - and she hops out right away. The old wood creaks as she ties up the boat and they begin to unload bundles of laundry.

Onni doesn't understand, when the tiny blur bolts out of the tree cover and arrows toward them, darting past the cottage. He catches the movement in the corner of his eye and freezes automatically - the terrible, contradictory instinct of a terrible world. His hand shoots out to seize Tuuri; her back is to the hill, and she doesn't see it.

Onni doesn't understand, when he recognizes Lalli's thin form, the pale fur of his cloak flaring out behind him with the sheer, breakneck speed of a scout's run. He holds nothing back, his feet somehow finding the only safe point on each moss-slick rock to land as he propels himself forward, flying. Lalli's mouth is open wider than Onni's ever seen it, gasping for each breath of air long before he crosses the field to reach them, and still Onni doesn't understand until Lalli skids to a stop at the edge of the dock, well short of them. He trembles and shudders like something hunted as he stares at them, his mouth still open - frozen. Lalli stares and stares, the absence of words tight in his throat, his eyes trying to communicate everything across the gap. His eyes are more luminous than Onni's ever seen them, shining with an ice-blue light that isn't really there.

"What's wrong, Lalli?" Tuuri asks, her mouth pursed in confusion. She pulls free from Onni's grip and trots over to reach for Lalli's face. "What -"

Before she can touch him, Lalli lunges forward and shoves her off the dock. The impact rocks the boat as Tuuri hits the deck back first; Onni braces himself just in time, the jars of preserves rattling and clanking against each other where they're stowed under the seat. "Lalli!" Onni yells, reflexively, shocked.

But there is something terribly wrong in Lalli's expression as he stares at his hands. It's something worse than blank. "G-go!" Lalli gasps out, voice cracking, and his eyes are too stark in his pale, pale face.

And Onni understands.

Lalli slices through the knot Tuuri used to tie off the boat. Onni shoves off and sits back hard as he seizes the paddles.

By the time Tuuri rights herself, baffled and hurt, and asks why the heck Onni is rowing hard for the gate, Lalli is little more than a pale shape in the shade of the trees.

Onni starts shaking, and can't stop.

-

He takes them to the quarantine isle.

It's all he can think to do. Lalli - Lalli touching Tuuri wouldn't have been enough, _surely_ \- but two weeks is the only way to be sure. Procedure, drilled into Onni since he was old enough to speak.

He ties off the boat and stows the paddles on a shelf where Tuuri can't reach them and goes through the motions of readying everything in the quarantine house for another stay while Tuuri demands answers he doesn't have. They have more than enough food stowed in the boat to last them, even if home isn't -

He can't speak. Can't explain. A blister forms where he chafed his hands raw rowing them here without break, and he washes his hands in the sink until the skin turns bright red. There's no way to know - maybe it was in the village or maybe they brought it with them from the harvest, and it's already too late. He makes meals mechanically, with shaking hands, spreading jam on bread each morning until the texture and color and sweetness make him feel sick.

Tuuri's temper frays further every day, until she can do nothing but snap. "We already _did this_, Onni!" she argues, when he insists they check themselves for symptoms every morning. She drags her cot to the furthest end of the barracks from him and sullenly refuses to move it back.

It's fine. Onni sits up late by the windows in the main room. He stifles the sound in his hand, and wakes up with his eyes still raw and red from crying.

-

He can't sense half the things Lalli does. He's not nearly as sensitive.

But when he dreams, he can hear new, familiar voices whispering over the brackish water.

He knows, long before the containment ship arrives from Keuruu, collecting them on its way to cleanse the island. "You did absolutely right," the chief medic informs Onni, her voice gruff and muffled through the sterile suit as she escorts him and Tuuri into quarantine cells to finish another week.

-

He's not sure it's real, to Tuuri. Not sure that she…internalizes it. They spend most of the worst of it in containment, and once their quarantine period is completed to the medics' satisfaction, Onni asks them to keep Tuuri confined on the ship. When she learns that he did that, she starts crying.

Angry tears are better. She's only ten. She doesn't need to see this.

Wearing the proper protective gear and following sanitation protocols, Onni can visit their parents under strict supervision. The mask starts to dig grooves in his cheeks. It's been two weeks, but half the village is already silent and still - apparently, the quarantine breach occurred almost a month ago. The deaths come in quiet stages as those initially infected cycle out, and those infected at the festival begin to show signs. Soon, the cleansing crew will start burning.

Even with mask and gloves and suit, when his mother reaches out to touch his cheek one last time with her soft, sad smile, Onni flinches.

He never forgives himself for that.

-

The containment crew times it for a day with light rain, to help control the fire before it can spread past the contaminated region. At this time of the year, rain is almost constant; winter is well on its way to settling on the lake, with the harvest season almost a month past.

Lalli is there when Ensi leads the rites to send on the souls of their family. They stand together as she sings, but Onni can't bear to watch.

Lalli's furs went missing along the way. He shivers in the same stained, grubby, worn orange-trim tunic Onni thinks he was wearing two weeks ago, his knees dark with dirt, his hair in the kind of tangle that Auntie Tuulikki always finger-combed out for him whenever Lalli would sit still. His cheeks are as hollow as Ensi's, his eyes huge in a too-narrow face. His hands clench into fists by his side, but his expression is as blank as ever. Rivulets of rain sluice from his hair down his cheeks.

Onni doesn't know who has been taking care of Lalli.

But when Ensi walks to her weathered boat, one of the last tied up by the dock, she passes her rifle to Lalli without a word. When Lalli automatically tries to join her, as he would for any other scouting trip, she jerks her head in a curt shake.

As they follow the small handful of survivors filing back onto the containment ship, Ensi rows into the heavy, hanging mists to the east alone.

-

Whatever Ensi finds in the east - it wins.

It starts hunting them in dreams.

Every so often, in the wider lake, villages fall silent.

-

(Sometimes, Onni forgets the exact way Lalli's fist trembled when Onni took his hand, to guide him away from the pyres. For once, Lalli hadn't pulled away. His hand was freezing.)

-

There are procedures in place. Other islands scattered around Saimaa, willing to take in survivors with brusque, no-nonsense acceptance. Young mages can always earn their keep, even half-trained ones. The region was hit hard, but one of their family friends survives and offers the Hotakainens a place on a smaller island to the south. If they go there and integrate with the community, Onni will be responsible for raising his sister and his cousin. Keeping them safe.

In the small cabin assigned to them, neither Tuuri nor Lalli speak. Tuuri leans against the sealed shutters of the window and insists she's not crying, her mood swinging wildly from bitter silence to forced cheer whenever they venture out into the mess hall. Lalli still isn't eating. The bowls of bland porridge Onni leaves under the bed go untouched.

And Onni can't stop shaking.

The crying spells come every night, and in close quarters like these he always emerges to Tuuri's hands clamped over her ears, her own eyes screwed up, and Lalli peering at him, unblinking. 

At least his mother always managed to smile. He can't even give them _that_ much.

He can't do this alone. He can't - do this.

-

The military offers stability and structure he can't provide. No one in Keuruu is a stranger to training children to survive.

-

Adjusting for Lalli is never impossible - just sometimes frustrating.

The frustration is usually mutual. When something is self-evident to Lalli, it’s too obvious to waste words explaining.

Yet military routine suits him. There are hiccups - Ensi taught him more about staying silent than she did about how to fill in an official report with words - but once he has the daily schedule down, he seems to settle. They fold him into Keuruu’s night scouts with military efficiency, and whatever informal magecraft Ensi taught Lalli out in the field remains informal. One part of a scout’s miscellaneous skillset, rather than the focus as it would’ve been in the mage rotation. When Onni offers or scolds or orders Lalli to sit down and listen, he usually meets apparently uncomprehending eyes, or a recalcitrant frown and a huff before Lalli makes his escape. There is an ominous period at the start of their teens where both Lalli and Tuuri sulk equally, eerily alike, and Onni is filled with despair.

Lalli is many things. Uncomprehending isn’t one of them.

But he _is_ proud. Onni usually has the most success sitting down across from him when Lalli slinks in to tug on the back of Onni’s cloak of his own accord, with narrowed eyes and scraped knees.

“Kuutar, for clear moonlight woven most fine,” Onni tells him. He sketches out the names in the dirt, and Lalli cranes his neck over to stare down, his eyes luminous as he drinks it in. “Mielikki, for sure footing in the wet green wood.”

Clear, straightforward invocations go over best; when Onni brings out his kantele to demonstrate more abstract, long-form runo, Lalli listens and watches but refuses to touch the strings. “Can’t run and play at the same time,” Lalli insists. He darts to the gate and hovers there when Onni tries to call him back, not quite making eye contact because he has places to be. “So what’s the point?”

“So that you know it if you need it. What if there’s an emergency and I’m not there?”

“Mrr.”

But Lalli absorbs it all, adapting what he chooses, shrugging at the rest. He grows up thin and gangly and solitary, Ensi written into the bones of him.

-

"There is only so far you can advance," Head Mage Aari informs Onni, "without patrol experience. If you do not want to leave the walls, no one will force you. But you _will_ be on central defense for the rest of your career."

To Onni, that sounds just fine.

The smoke from Aari's cigarette curls and drifts out the thin crack in the bottom of the window as he sighs and inks the stooping wings of the mage corps stamp on Onni's paperwork. Ensi had a reputation that permeated Saimaa and reached even here - she was one of the first, if not _the _first, her name known in whispers - and they expect strange things from Hotakainens.

Onni doesn't see that he has any obligation to indulge them.

Once he has his niche, he cements himself in place. When others in the mage corps move up in the ranks or take on positions of responsibility in the field outposts, Onni digs in his heels deep and patrols the walls with a particular glower for anyone who so much as hints that he has the power to assist with large, important operations. _Change _is not worth it. He is secure and sure where he is; shifting his focus now would mean inevitable risk, in those first few months of changing gears. Why would he want to gamble with others' lives like that? The idea holds no appeal whatsoever.

In central defense, he becomes part of the foundation. Soon, he knows the contours of the wall like he knows the strokes of his father's face in his own reflection. When something twisted and crawling slithers out of the water or slams into the outermost circle of defenses on the mainland, sending other mages running for their boots, Onni stands, closes his eyes, and raises a hand to sing the wind and fire and lightning. He knows the rhyme of their true names and their creation, deeply enough to ask and be answered, and when he opens his eyes again it doesn't make a difference if the other mages avert their gaze or sit a little further down the bench from him, or if his fingers leave scorch marks on the table where he pressed his hand down.

He's nothing special. But he's alive, and Tuuri is safe, and they are all fine where they are.

-

Tuuri joins the skalds. She dabbles in the mechanics unit, because Keuruu cross-trains, but the in-depth, military-grade training in Icelandic and Swedish languages draws her in. Long before Onni stops waking up with swollen eyes, Tuuri processes her grief and exuberantly throws herself into the skald work with joyful energy. Keuruu archives more records and old books than their small school back home ever could.

It falters a little, when she realizes non-immune skalds aren't usually the ones assigned to rotate through islands and collect the records and stories from abroad. Military discipline can't quite kill her spirit, but her blank mask is as good as Lalli's when Onni sees her in the skald offices. Head Skald Sohvi backs her people when questioned, but her standards are exacting, and on the job she rarely tolerates idle chatter. A circle of skalds only a few years older take Tuuri under their wing: allies, if not quite close enough to be called friends. Between that and the casual acquaintances Tuuri makes in the quartermaster's office and the kitchens and mechanics, she gets by. She's always been better at - all this - than Onni and Lalli are, and now when she socializes with the skalds and Lalli wanders in and out on his own whim, they only rarely wind up alone at a Hotakainen table.

Almost eleven years. Onni forgets to be careful with her. He forgets how creative Tuuri can be. He forgets that she still doesn't understand. She grieves and misses their parents, but he shielded her from the worst. Maybe that was the worst way he failed her.

_Visit Keuruu_, Onni told her once, as a concession - but Keuruu was never going to be enough. Lalli goes out every night to scout, in wet spring and deep winter snow, proof that the world is a wider place. She never stops wishing to go on an adventure.

So when the opportunity arrives, she leaps.

-

She reaches back to him one last time, and Onni - can't.

He summons a smile that breaks something inside him, and waves long after the ship is out of sight.

-

The world is a cruel place.

-

Tuuri leaves, so alive and optimistic and determined to see and explore everything, and she dies.

He sets himself aflame, burns himself out, and in the end all that's left are the ashes. He flings himself into the sky until the air thins to nothing in his lungs, and falls, numb and hollow.

When Lalli comes back in the company of all the others except the one who matters, Onni pulls him in with one arm. Even that is more than he would usually ask of Lalli - but Lalli ducks his head and endures Onni in this moment of weakness.

Any relief is a dull, muted weight that Onni can't quite feel. He doesn't feel much of anything, through the ash-clogged, deadened mire of his thoughts.

There is nothing left of him to give.

-

Onni walks out, intending to die, and lives. That might be the cruelest part.

Someone needs to end the thing in the east. It stirs with new purpose when the last living Hotakainens leave Finland, and Onni can trace the terrible, inevitable line of fate tying it in their wake. If it isn't stopped, it will follow the path they took, out of the lost reaches of Saimaa to Keuruu and beyond. He knows, when he leaves Lalli with the first friend he's ever made, that he's going out to make the same sacrifice or bargain that Ensi walked out to make a decade ago.

This is fine. Lalli will be fine without him; he always was. Lalli will be safer, in fact. Once he has a routine in a new place, the time will fly by. With Tuuri gone -

Well. No one will miss him. Onni never mattered much.

-

He forgets, sometimes, that whenever he cried in Keuruu, he would look up to see Lalli watching him - from on top of a crate, from the bottom shelf, from the foot of Onni's bed. No matter how he tried to conceal himself, Lalli always found him.

He forgets what Lalli will do to save who he loves.

When his voice breaks, and blood chokes his throat, and he runs out of words to stop the kade's scything song from slicing into his arms, he is not alone.

Lalli calls down the sun.

-

A recovering mage can survive in a recovery sleep, untended, approximately five days. Longer than the average human, but still. The longest any Keuruu mage survived after the full dissipation of their luonto before withering, even with life support, was three weeks.

Onni wakes up a month later.

Judging by the open door of the hospital room, and the fact that Lalli is napping in a chair beside Onni's IV drip, he slept straight through quarantine. Small blessings. Lalli is, as ever, too skinny, his narrow wrists crossed under his head and his legs folded up impossibly to fit. His Swedish friend sits in his own chair properly, eating a muffin and paging through a flimsy Swedish magazine with a carefully constructed look of boredom. He's clearly not reading it.

The quiet only lasts until Emil realizes Onni is staring at them through the one eye that will open when he tells it to. Then Emil splutters - ridiculously - and fumbles both the magazine and muffin in his hands, spilling crumbs all over the floor as he reaches over to poke Lalli awake. "Stupid brother is awake!" he babbles, in loud, very broken Finnish. Then he runs to the door and starts calling out to the people in the hallway in Swedish.

Onni sighs. It is the middle of the day, judging by the view through the window, and yet it is still too early to be dealing with Lalli's taste in men. It will always be too early to deal with that. He lets his sore eye close and tilts his head back, adjusting to the raw, scratching texture in the back of his throat when he tries to swallow.

The bed shifts under someone's weight. Onni jolts, both eyes flying open. Lalli transfers from the chair to the bed without touching the floor, crossing his legs with a frown. "Stupid Onni," he grumbles, rearranging the hospital blankets with stiff, imperious tugs until he can glare at the wall past Onni properly from the region of Onni's feet. He avoids eye contact with a vengeance, meeting anything but Onni's gaze. "You're not allowed to be alone. You're too dumb to make important life decisions on your own. You can come set fires in a weird foreign place or something, too."

Then he flops over Onni's legs and lays there, glowering out the window with narrowed eyes. "If you think you can leave and I wouldn't come find you, then you don't understand _anything_," he mutters.

Lalli sounds like he's about to cry.

"Mmh. That is fair," Onni concedes, after a long moment to swallow past the lump in his throat. His voice is an unfamiliar rasp. He leans back against the pillows, and tries to remember how to relax in a body that hasn't moved in weeks. When he stretches, Lalli grumbles and shifts his weight to better pin Onni's shins under his stomach.

"Did I hear the word 'fire'?" the Swede asks, popping his head back in. He is followed by a small avalanche of people.

"Didn't the staff tell you to get down from there?" Mikkel asks Lalli, with the dry Icelandic of someone who is perfectly aware that even if Lalli understood, he wouldn't care.

"Mrr." Lalli squirms one last time, and settles. "Don't cry, Onni."

That is, of course, entirely out of his control. There is a warmth in his chest, and a piercing, hot grief, and the spring flowers pushing up through the pale, scorched earth of his dreams sting too much for him to feel nothing anymore.

He couldn't stop crying if he wanted to. 

**Author's Note:**

> /posts this 4 the sole purpose of getting Jossed in 2-3 days/ I DO THIS.


End file.
